As I was considering what topic to discuss for this blog post, I found myself mindlessly clicking around YouTube from video to video, once again in a stuck in a situation brought on by procrastination. But upon going to yet another related video suggested by YouTube, I realized that I was in a network the […]

A technology reporter for the New York Times, Jenna Wortham, published an article today about incorrect information cascades sparked by Twitter. The article describes Hurricane Sandy’s peak as a major topic for tens of thousands of twitter bloggers. The problem with this increased activity was that the information being spread was not accurate. The article […]

Second only to the Super Bowl in Facebook ‘buzz’ for the year of 2012, Hurricane Sandy has generated enormous amounts of communication and information sharing via social media like Facebook and Twitter throughout the past few days. In many cases, it was the only avenue of interaction with family and friends who were praying for […]

Search engine optimization is a method that many websites use to make sure that their site shows up higher on Google (and other search engines) for various keywords. In many ways, search engine optimization is an easy way to improve a site’s authority score as was discussed in class with respect to Google’s page rank […]

The quality of any publication is determined by the number of citations it receives. Is Page-Rank algorithm inspired from this? This is an article from the website reddit.com, an online discussion forum and image board formed of many sub-reddits which are formed of different interests ranging from women’s rights to television shows. This article […]

A few years ago consumers had a choice to make: Blu-Ray or HD DVD. Today, everyone knows what Blu-Ray is, but most people couldn’t tell you that there was ever something called an HD DVD. Blu-Ray won the “good quality DVD war,” and they did so because of an information cascade. This article provides many […]

The place of cigarettes in society has changed greatly in a span of 2 score. The prevalence of smoking in the United States has reduced from 45% to 21% in the past 4 decades. Research studies conducted by Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis and Dr. James H. Fowler track the manner in which the cessation of […]

It’s widely accepted that unscrupulous bankers tricked unknowing consumers into loans that they could not afford, leading to the financial crisis. But it turns out the “victims” were not mainly the unsophisticated population. A new study finds that it was the highly educated Americans that took on unmanageable debt of housing. This occurred not in […]

http://www.voxeu.org/article/riots-and-revolutions-digital-age An information cascade is, essentially, a phenomenon where decisions are made based on the previous actions of others. This occurrence is relevant in almost every aspect of our society, but is most notably essential in political regime changes. Lately information cascades in regime changes have grown even more prominent with the development of new […]

We’ve all seen the news explode with stories about Hurricane Sandy and all the catastrophic effects of the storm. But many have overlooked is that beyond the news, weather channels, and government announcements, social media is also driving emergency responses and updates. “Sandy” has surged to the number 2 most talked about topic of the […]